Coronavirus Around The World

Inspiration:

I was inspired by a book I read that was about the heroes of the Coronavuirs. I read that book and thought to myself, "I want to write a book that gives children an opportunity to find out the answers they are looking for". So, I thought about my life. I am a ninth-grader from Atlanta, GA currently attending an international school in Quito, Ecuador. I know many people from all over the world. I decided that my main characters needed to contact people from around the world to show the readers that the whole world is facing COVID-19. But how would my main characters be able to talk to these characters? I am using video calls to connect with my friends and family in other places, so a video call was the obvious answer for me.

What it does:

Coronavirus Around The World presents the Coronavirus in an approachable way by including children in the conversation. It answers common questions about and shows the impact of the Coronavirus, globally. I also hope that Coronavirus Around The World will help children feel less afraid. Quite often we are afraid of the unknown and I hope that this book will make more things known to them.

How I built it:

I built Coronavirus Around The World with three programs. I used Google Docs to write the manuscript and I used an application called Sketches to do the Illustrations. To turn the book into a PDF, I used Powerpoint.

Challenges I ran into:

While writing and illustrating Coronavirus Around The World, I ran into a few challenges. These were doing the illustrations, wording the book in an approachable way, making sure that the book had accurate information, and making the length of the book manageable for a 6-9 year-old. As far as illustrations go, it is important to know that I do not consider myself a good drawer. It seems to me that anything I draw comes out looking like a chicken, but when I try to draw a chicken, it doesn't look like one. So, for this project, drawing was extra hard. I put in 20-25 hours to draw 18 illustrations. The wording was also a challenge for me. I needed to make sure that everything I wrote could be understood by my readers or had an explanation that clued them in. Making sure the book had accurate information was very important and quite the challenge. With new news coming out every day, it was hard to ensure that I was writing the latest facts. The last challenge I faced was the length of the book. There was lots of information that I wanted to include and many questions I wanted to answer, but one of my main goals was that the book was approachable. This meant that I had to keep it on the shorter side.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of:

I am proud of the illustrations I drew and the future for Coronavirus Around The World, which I have put into motion.

What I learned:

I learned that writing a book is easier than it sounds. Once you have been inspired and the ideas start to flow, it's not so hard. The hard part is starting and applying yourself to something that looks like a lot of work.

What's next for Coronavirus Around The World:

After I wrote Coronavirus Around The World, I realized that in order for this to be accessible for children around the world, the book needed to be translated into different languages. Since I have access to many people who speak other languages, I decided that I can utilize them to translate Coronavirus Around The World. The book is being translated into Mandarin Chinese, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian, which are the languages spoken by the characters in the book.

Built With

• google-docs
• powerpoint
• sketches